full of moxie and viscosity

I'm having an uncontrollable laughter day. I'm watching Dazed and Confused on television (STILL watching TV, what is my problem? I see now why it becomes people's lives. It's so hypnotizing) and I am laughing uncontrollably at almost everything. After I do that, I'm a little embarrassed to be laughing so hard all alone at things that are not that funny, so I pretend to go to sleep. Then I have to laugh at myself again for doing that. It's a horrible cycle. Thank god for uncontrollable laughter.

I try so hard to remove myself from the fantasy. I busy my day. Watch foreign television because it's interesting and pause on a channel that has maps on it because I think I might learn something. I'm watching television. Does this sound odd to anybody else? To ignore my dream. I just watch it, hoping to land on Cartoon Planet or a rerun of the Cosby Show. I find a romantic movie. Cry through it. Damn myself, this is so hopeless. Love isn't hopeless, I'll always believe in it, like I always say- Love Will Save The World. But the fantasy is hopeless. I can't even understand what love is until I feel it, so this whole drawn out torturous masochistic dream world thing is pretty much pointless. Ha! My entire life, my work, my voice, all is defined by that fantasy. And it's an Ouroboros. Until something breaks the cycle- someone, it's infinitesimally endless. I consume what I shed.

My Conclusion For Today:
My entire life is pointless!

(but the burn of it makes it worthwhile. I will continue on: my cyclical, obfuscating conundrum of a life is totally worth it as long as I can feel this burn, the slice of the possibility, the enhanced awareness of hope.)

I dyed my hair today. Really dark, dark red. Bright, dark red. I didn't dye it permanently, but I did indeed dye it.
Brings to mind another list, not a scent list, but a hair list. I feel strange about having hair be such an important part of my life, but it really defines me, and when I alter it dramatically, it means something.
Okay. Here goes:
from long to short
Freshman year of high school. In an attempt to fit in, move from the safety of my eighth grade clique into the grossly overrated high school world, I chop ten inches off my hair. It grows for the rest of my high school life.
from curly to straight
Daniel Peck tells me my hair is better straight. I straighten it EVERY NIGHT.
from straight to curly
Freshman year of college. No more straightening. I rebel against the magnetism of DP.
from long to short
Summer after sophomore year. I'm really lonely for JR, my hair becomes really caging and I want to break free... but I can't. I chop off my hair and feel really horrible about it. It goes from the middle of my back to about shoulder length.
from blonde to red
Back at SC, I hook up with a dark stranger (MS) and JR freaks out. I dye my hair the next day. RED.
from medium to short short
MS comes to visit. YOW. I have no clue how to feel. In a fit, I cut all of my hair off in one chop, chin length. I'm modeling it after a purple wig. I wish I had that purple wig still. It was a good one. My hair is super short. and RED.
from red and curly to blonde and totally straight and messed up
I start in again with JR. Decide to go blonde again, and in the process, remove all curl from my hair. I am bobbed, blonde, and straight. There's nothing I can do about it.
from short to shorter
Summer in Boston. I am Starting Over. I cut my hair two inches a month until it's totally short. An inch long all over.
blonde to red
Today, I dye my hair red again. I feel Indie and sort of... weird.

So that's the history. Sadly, it was more for me than for you. But my hair gives me an outlet. I don't pierce much, and I don't tattoo. I dye, I cut, I straighten. It's the way I deal. What a strange way, but so definitive and visible. You will know me by my turned ankle and my red hair.

I wrote Nathan Gadd an email yesterday in hopes of getting some clues on how to be patient. Awaiting response.

A line I took from a story because it was too weird:
"Annie had her hands set hesitantly on the wheel, furtively, the same way I hold doorknobs."

I'm in the process of revising an old story (Love and Cigarettes, also known as The Carver and Earth, Wind and Fire-- an old Boyle story of mine). I've decided it's my favorite story. Not because it's particularly good, but because it really defines a time in my life. I like things like that. I still use the coconut smelling shampoo that reminds me of Dylan Heaney. I burn a chai candle to remind myself of Lauren Choplin. And I revise this story because it reminds me of early spring, Campus Cruiser, Nathan Gadd. There are certain songs, certain things that really let me escape into my memories. I once wrote a whole paragraph about passionfruit- I searched through my old emails for it, but I couldn't find it. I think Emily Roellke (charntog) ended up using it for a monologue in her drama class one year. Regardless, I wrote about how passionfruit was my Boston scent. I bought everything passionfruit- lotion, linen spray, body spray, room spray, more sprays than you can imagine. Why is it that scent can bring back a memory so quickly? It's not just memory recall, either, it's like, memory re-invention, memory re-experience. A very intense, crazy thing. A quick list of my smell memory recallers:
CKOne: 8th grade, crushes on Hoang Luu and Ross B
Passionfruit: Boston, summer, Guiness posters, McCormick and Schmick's
Gio: my mom
Paint and sweat: my dad
Tuna: the shop (by the way, it's been sold. who knew.)
Aromatherapy white lotion by B&B works: dinner with Justin at Cafe 84
Cigarettes: 3530, Nathan, music
Coconut: Dylan
Juniper Breeze: Gammie
Marc Jacobs: Vicki, Carson, Nick Nantell

That's all on smells for today. I need to tackle the hair issue soon. It's a good one.

I hit my head on my car door while I was pretending to talk on my cell phone yesterday. Now I have a big bump. I wish I had whacked myself harder. I like to have bruises to press and bumps to touch. Makes me feel alive.

I can easily cite the man and woman who gave me the patience I have for most things in life. Dad, Mom. Easy as pie. They let me do the things I needed to do without being enablers and hurried me through rough times without letting me ignore them. They let me brush the curls from my hair and watched me live and burn and they let it all happen to me- without letting me get too tangled up.

I can wait patiently for many things. A bus, a train, a friend to show up, cake to bake, phone to ring, package to come, a child to put together a puzzle. I am a horribly impatient lover. A horribly impatient woman when it comes to dealing with men. I have a few men to thank for this, but I'll leave their names out of the writing for now. They'll get theirs when the novel comes out. But for now, I want to talk about this impatience in a sort of general way, speak of experiences and not people.

There's the biggest one, the man who could not give me what I needed. I tried so hard to be patient, for years, I waited, carefully, never asking him for a cent of his fortune, never realizing I had my own sitting in a vault. But now I'm wildly impatient, expecting all of the men I meet to be as charming, as talented, as deep, as dark as he was. I waited around because he was worth waiting around for. If the new prospects come up a little shallow in those areas, I become so impatient. Impatient to sign them off. Completely uninterested in waiting for them to figure out where they fit in my life.

But just as impatient am I with the men who fill those requirements. My past shows it in blindingly clear colors. A beautiful singer briefly enters the periphery of my world and we're sent into a secret, perfect fantasy, nobody knows but us. We end, as we need to, and we spend two years apart. I see him again, and I'm impatient to tell him how I'm still in love with him. He tells me first. And then tells me how he's moving in with his girlfriend. I hear he's in California the other day, and I'm impatient again. Impatient for his relationship to end.

Then there was the boy. We drank slurpees and smoked cigarettes and he talked to me about Jesus and I talked to him about potato bugs and we sat on a roof together once. We danced together once. And I was so impatient to know what I was to him that I never stopped to see what he was to me. I hear now that things were different, our perspectives were skewed, and now there's a whole new kind of impatience.

I'm impatient to be the person that I'm going to be. I'm impatient to move beyond my stupid mistakes, my flaws that can never be fixed by apology or even time. Just flaws that have to be fixed by me making myself into a better person.

It's not for me though. I'm impatient to become this person because as soon as I do, I'll find the right man. And this brings me right back where I started. If I were the person I want to be, I wouldn't care about romantic love this much. I'd be happy being me. I am so impatient to figure this out. It's a vicious, vicious cycle. All the guilt and shame and regret I feel is somehow manifesting itself in my writing today. I'd stop feeling it if I thought that I could go back and do things differently. Ah, but this is just the amber moment, right? We're simply frozen, caught in the amber of this moment. All of the moments are the same. I'm just impatient to get to the next one.

Balance.

spontaneity, let's live for now AND careful, careful, your heart's been broken before, no reason for the pain
geeky AND accessible
flavorful AND subtle
fervor AND reality
taking vitamins and working on my upper thigh muscles AND falling into a lovely groove of quietude and meditation
catharsis AND health
money AND art
sex AND friendship
writing AND music
future AND present AND past AND death AND life AND childhood
uncle AND boyfriend
wireless communication AND not paying 100 dollars a month for it
having long nails AND not... ya know
travel AND stability
heart AND hands
finding me AND sharing me
worrying about burden AND burden itself
intuition AND lessons learned
pasta AND steak

Balance?

have to write in lowercase today.

a golden sunset in my rearview mirror and big grey storm clouds out my windshield make for a lovely gold square in the middle of a grey sky. i feel overwhelmingly focused. like the man with the buffer on hawthorne two nights ago, three hours in between sightings, he's still buffing that car, 2 am, still buffing that car. appreciation and apology. overwhelmingly similar emotions. overwhelmingly.

Spent a good long time this morning talking on my cell phone. To nobody. I picked this habit up when I first got my cell phone, back in, what was it, 2001? Naw, 2002. Spring. I'm uncommonly good at it. I've fooled the best of them. It's something I can do anytime, anywhere, and it's wildly entertaining.

Vicki called my cell and we talked for awhile, but her phone was going to cut out, so we hung up. I wasn't done talking, though, so I just continued to hold a conversation. Not with her, it was with someone else. Some friend I had spoken to recently, I'm not sure who exactly.

Another funny part of the whole thing is that I can't hang them up- not without properly saying goodbye. After I talked to the person for awhile on the way to work, I went to Starbucks, continued to talk to them (there was even a time when I had to set them down on the counter and we got accidentally disconnected- had to call them back, sigh) until I got into my car. I decided I was done with the call, but I couldn't just set the phone down. I had to say, "Alright, well, I should go, I'm going to work now, and I'm low on minutes anyway- no, I'll- hey!! I call you! I'll call you tonight, okay? HAHAHAH!!! No!! HA! Shut up. Yeah, I'll call you tonight on my way home, free minutes are the highlight of my life. Alright, bye, pookie." I tried to just set the phone down, but I felt so bad, I had to say goodbye. What if they thought I was being rude?

I'm really obsessed with making it sound real. I say random words sometimes:
"Wait, why did he say that? Ducks? Are you sure he said ducks?"
to spice up the conversation, but for the most part we're discussing a subject which could easily be a conversation with anyone. I sometimes talk about things that are going on in my life- this is a good challenge because it gives me the chance to evaluate how differently I would approach certain subject with different people- and how I think they would react. And I'm obsessed with the authentic laugh (easy enough when I think about how I'm talking to a FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION).

The BEST PART of this is that it doesn't cost me any minutes! It's more entertaining than talking to some people, and it's totally free. The only cost is possible oil buildup on the side of my face from the phone pressing up against it. But hey, that's what they make earbuds for. Thank god for earbuds.

Listened to Stacy's church service today on a CD. It was beautiful. It reminded me of when I was about ten and we used to attend Grace Methodist Church right by my house. It was a small church. I was supposed to carry palms on Palm Sunday and we all completely forgot. I remember rushing to the church and they handed me a palm frond to keep as a souvenir, but I'm pretty sure we just threw it away.

Those were the days of the Rat Boy. What was his name? It was a girl's name, and he rode with his rat on the back of his skateboard. My mom let us get rats after seeing and playing with his, but we made sure we got women rats because the man rat always had his testicles hanging down and scraping on the ground. We thought that looked uncomfortable. I remember also the day when all of a sudden I didn't want to hang out with Rat Boy anymore- and he came to my front door and I told him no.


(I feel guilty having each blog have more than one subject, like somehow I'm being rude)


Things that have recently been chasing me:

cars without headlights on:

-twice in Los Angeles (I can't write L.A. or la or los angeles. It has to be Los Angeles.)
--once while driving back from Krister's show
--once while driving alone somewhere else

-today when it was raining and someone was behind me with no lights on. everyone
else had their lights on, but not this guy, and he stood out. he was a big blank square
in the midst of lighted clouds of rain.

weird rain

-last night when I was going to sleep. Everything was quiet in the house, Tim had been
asleep for a long time and I had been up playing Snood Towers (my life is over, by
the way, Snood Towers rocks). I was in bed, thinking about how glad I was that I
managed to get ready for bed without picking, and suddenly it started raining really
hard. Not just a light pattering, or even regular hard rain. It was intense, hail-sounding
rain. It only lasted for maybe three minutes. I haven't enjoyed anything as perfectly
as I enjoyed the rain last night. I felt so calm and happy, warm, literally content.

-today when I was driving to work. It was perfect out, blue blue skies and big white
clouds, 73 degrees on the ol' thermometer. I could see the rain, it was like in a
cartoon when the storm cloud hovers over one person and just rains on them.
I could see it as I drove into it: really sporadic and splattery rain, clouds of rain instead
of sheets, shooting out from under the tires of the people in front of me.

Alright, so we all know about my little dissociative disorder that I have so luckily picked up. I think that it goes way beyond what I've thought in the past. I realized today that I am completely obsessed with skin. If someone has good skin, no matter how ugly their hair is, how fat their stomach, how insane they are, they are AUTOMATICALLY more attractive than I am. It's a total obsession. And even moreso, I'm still picking. There is not a day that goes by without me doing it. I thought that once I got the novel going it would be a cinch- no more picking. I'm catharting (is that a word?) the demons that cause me to do it. But now I realize more than ever that things do not happen in a linear manner. Not for me, anyway. It's all very circular and sort of globulous (again, is that a word?). Today is yesterday is tomorrow etc. My perspective of the past changes because of today and obviously the future is changed because of today in the same way, so... today is tomorrow is yesterday? I just painted myself into a postmodern corner and it sucks.

Okay, back on track. What this all means is: My obsession with other people's skin is another manifestation of this whole mutilation thing- another way to literally PICK on myself. Can't I just get with it? For crying out loud. I'm getting really sick of it. Okay, starting today, no more. (How honestly hysterical is this?)

Conclusion: though I seem to emulate a confident person, and I feel fairly confident most of the time, I've got some crazy stuff going on below my mutilated surface. Stuff that I can only logically analyze, not stuff that I can control.

Conclusion #2: There will officially be no more whining or bitching on this blog. I am not this pathetic.

today i'm debating my lack of capital usage. since i started working all the time, and since when i work i am required to use capitals, i've started noticing how ugly that little "i" looks. does I look better? sigh, it does. here I go. I still refuse to capitalize beginnings of sentences. this whole debate reminds me of when I was a senior in high school and smitten with Daniel Peck- the fourteen year old- and I used to capitalize my R's for no reason, in the middle of woRds there would be a capital R, sized the same as a lowercase. then a year later I slipped a capital R in the middle of something and was sure it was a sign- I wasn't over him yet.

I just realized there is a sentence "does I look better?" which is awesome.

another thing I'm considering today is apologies. I'm not sure that apologies are good things. of course I feel bad about things that I do, and I'm very quick to apologize. but what is an apology? words insisting that we feel bad about something we did? it doesn't change the fact that we did it, or the fact that we would have probably done it again if we could go back. I guess it's just a way of providing the people in our lives with little pads on which to rest.

I haven't written on the novel in a while. it looks at me all the time, the little bugger, and it's all like "hey, rach, remember me? the embodiment of all of your vulnerability and fear? and, eventually, your healing? come on, come on, make me happen!" but then I play ten or twelve games of Snood, jill off, and call someone on the telephone. I'm halfway between wanting to write new scenes from years ago and wanting to publish the damn thing as is.

OH AND SPEAKING OF PUBLISHING, I got my first letter of rejection two days ago. I wasn't sad at all, a little ping of "aw." but then after that, I was pumped. I can be a writer! I can resubmit that story and write new ones and get rejected some more, and it's all great and the way it's supposed to be. Wonderful. I'm pumped. Can't wait for more rejections. Uh-oh, now I'm capitalizing sentences. Damn this real world.